Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Klar, a Vermont grass-fed beef and sheep farmer, and an attorney and pastor who lives in Irasburg.
It is time for some truth about illegal immigrants and “industrial farms.” There has been uncritical acceptance lately of this hogwash that Vermont is dependent on illegal foreign laborers to “save” its dairy industry. I have some criticisms — or critical reflections — to propose.
When my great-grandfather lost an arm in a hunting accident, there was no Vermont program to subsidize his hand-milking of cows: He switched to growing fruit trees. And when my grandfather was forced to close down his farm because of expensive improvements mandated by the Vermont agriculture department, there were no cries and moans from our legislators. Yet somehow these men had managed to operate their dairy farms without Guatemalan illegals.
The irony here is that Vermont’s small farms were allowed (encouraged?) for decades to fail so as to “consolidate” into “more profitable” large farms. Those large farms are now what comprise our “dairy industry.” The very phrase “dairy industry,” employed unthinkingly by the likes of Seven Days (e.g., “Fear on the Farm: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Threatens Vermont Dairy Industry,” Paul Heintz, Seven Days, Feb. 15, 2017) is oxymoronic. And the whining cries of the industrial defenders are absurd.
My grandfathers, and the thousands of small dairymen who were callously crushed by this state’s government, did not have the voice in the Legislature that the dairy industry and the big banks have now, or else maybe we’d still have a vibrant small-farm economy and cleaner air, water and soil.
First of all, we are talking here about farm workers who are here illegally, and are being encouraged and defended for being here illegally — let them apply for visas and pay taxes, so that the mega-farms interviewed by Seven Days do not have to lament anonymously while availing themselves of slave labor and tax fraud in order to survive.
Second, let our governor and lieutenant governor and other representatives not so blatantly pick and choose what laws they abide by or ignore. Somehow, if Vermont citizens break the law to feed their families they are thugs; when illegal aliens break immigration laws to feed non-citizens to benefit industrial operations that pretend to be farms, they are victims. These massive dairy industry farms are the very ones that pollute our waterways, receive massive public grants and subsidies, push out small sustainable farms, and spray Round-up and other chemicals on our monarch butterflies and honeybees. Yet, we are told by the Trump-bashing Seven Days that in the last 15 years illegal immigrants “… have come to play an essential role in Vermont’s dairy industry.” Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman is then quoted as saying, “It is very hard work, sometimes at very odd hours or extended hours. … Most Americans don’t want to do that work anymore.” Well, Mr. Zuckerman, my grandfather and great-grandfather were willing to do that work, without government subsidy, and without inviting illegal immigrants into our mountains to do it so that large ventures could poison the land with public monies. If the “industry” can’t hack it, perhaps we should just let the market control — either the milk price will provide, or they can go under, like the thousands of small farms which were not rescued by large banks and even larger government.
But that brings us to the third and biggest issue I wish to broach: the banks behind the farms. Isn’t that really who our “representatives” are representing? Because in truth, when and if our large dairy industry farms fall, the large banking interests that hold those loans will inherit huge swaths of polluted farmland in a depressed region, with no practical alternative uses. Most large dairies have little actual equity in their ventures. As VTDigger reported back in 2009 (when milk prices were even better than today): “Many lenders are restructuring and refinancing loans. They are also allowing farmers to make interest-only payments on loans. … The question is, if milk prices stay low and farmers don’t break even until next summer, as projected by long-term USDA predictions, how long can banks and government lenders defer principal payments on loans?” (“Losses Driving Farms Into Debt,” Anne Galloway, Aug. 31, 2009). Well, those long-term USDA predictions were duds, and the banks are now panicking because without illegal slave labor those mega-farms will fail, and the banks will be the ones “holding the bag” … (not the udder). They will no longer defer principal, because they will be in bankruptcy court.
My grandfathers, and the thousands of small dairymen who were callously crushed by this state’s government, did not have the voice in the Legislature that the dairy industry and the big banks have now, or else maybe we’d still have a vibrant small-farm economy and cleaner air, water and soil. The way out of this nasty mess, we are told, is to encourage more enslavement of more poor illegal foreigners that we are called upon to weep over because our own citizens are too lazy to do the slave labor for the big banks and the industrial vultures who devoured their neighbors and pushed milk prices lower and pesticide use higher. And we’re to believe the failure is Donald Trump’s, because he’s picking on poor illegals. Sorry — we Vermonters are smarter than that, and we ain’t buyin’ what this government is sellin’ any more.
Maybe the industrial farms and big banks aren’t too big to fail after all. They are the ones who have been preying on small disadvantaged illegal slave labor to prop up their industrial enterprises, and they don’t want the feds to slow the spigot of those underprivileged foreigners they recruit and abuse to undermine small farms and local wages. The times they are a changin’. Let the big farms a) use legal immigrants or locals, and pay taxes on fair wages, like other businesses; b) fail if they can’t; then, c) save us tens of millions of dollars that our government won’t have to spend in public money to clean up the environmental calamity that they have passed on to the citizenry in water pollution. Huge confinement dairies are not farms but industries: and they are the “alien” destroyers of our Green Mountains, our local communities, and our sustainable future. The reason they are floundering is because they are unsustainable. They are alien industrial farms, and they should be jettisoned, deported, and walled out.
